Real Life Wellness: You need a Personal Roadmap for Success
By Bill Hemmer
The biggest obstacle we all face to living a healthy lifestyle is the idea we are all made the same way. The idea that we are all made from the same DNA, therefore, what is good for you is also good for me. We agree we are all human beings, but past that we are all as different as every snowflake that drops from the sky.
There are no two people on the planet completely identical, even identical twins. So, your healthy lifestyle needs to be based on you and you alone. Functional Medicine provides you with a systematic way to do just that. We will look at every aspect of your Triangle of Health and create a customized plan of action based on the total results of that investigation.
We will assess your Mental, Physical and Chemical environments in order to personalize your plan to get the maximum results in the shortest period of time.
Your Mental assessment will include things like your family environment, church or social club involvement and work culture. These aspects of your life are extremely important, so we can identify your support system for your new healthy lifestyle. Without support, your ability to sustain any lifestyle changes is very much on jeopardy.
Your Physical assessment will include a physical examination to help us figure out the best ways to proceed in changing your fitness levels and add years to your life. Arthritis, old injuries, surgeries and scars must all be taking into consideration. If you have breath in your body, you can build lean muscle and build bone density. Both of these things will add years to your life and life to your years.
The Chemical assessment is by far the most intensive. We will assess everything from your digestive health, gut flora health, blood sugar handling, and ability to handle stress, inflammation, elimination and detoxification. All of these factors are important for us to understand.
Another part of your Chemical assessment is to make a list of all the medications you are currently taking. Drugs are designed to manage symptoms of disease. By managing symptoms, they change biological processes. But many times, those changes in biological processes cause other symptoms and deficiencies that are not linked back to the drug. Once we know exactly which drugs you are taking we can better understand if some of your current situation is secondary to side-effects of your current medications.
The final part of your Chemical assessment will be a dietary history. We need to know what you are currently eating. The worst thing you can do is to provide us with your best day of eating. This is not how you really eat. We want to understand how you really eat. It has been our experience; most people’s diet is lacking in many ways. You don’t have to feel bad about this.
Our society has created a huge nutritional problem that has been going on for 100 years. We are in the fourth generation of people who have been eating things never meant to be eaten.
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